vSphere 4 VMWare - Lots of Virtual Disks

I've woken up this morning to find my virtual enviroment suspended due to lack of disk space.

I'm having trouble understanding something on one of our virtual servers. Dynamics is a SQL 2005 server hosted on Windows 2003 x86 that has 3 disks (2x60GB, 1x30GB). There are no snapshots, and the machine is currently powered off.

When I look in the VMWare datastore, I can see GBs of files and can't understand why they're there!

Your left with all those AFTER a remove all snapshots? So in snapshot manager you are showing NO current snapshots?
Only thought then is that they are a leftover from a backup solution that is snapshoting VM's before backups and not deleting the delta's do the dates correspond to manual/forced backups maybe?

If you use NetScaler you will want to see these guides. The NetScaler How To Guides show administrators how to get NetScaler up and configured by providing instructions for common scenarios and some not so common ones.

Unfortunatly this is one of the real buggers with VMWares virtualisation.
There needs to be more work done on the Snapshot technologies.
For you this maybe a disaster.
What you need to know.
Once you have run out of disk it's too late to remove snapshots. Removing a smapshot can pccupy as much disk as the original delta occupied. So if you have 10GB of data in a set of deltas you need to be sure you have this same amount available before inforportaing that snapshot.
Basicly at this point your in trouble.
My best advice is to perform a cold clone of the system as it stands.
So be sure you have about 200GB of disk available,
In the VC rename the original Server by appending it's name with "-org"
cold clone the guest to another Lun using it's original name.
Once you have this sorted implement snap hunter.
OH and don't use thin disk.. I sure you don't need me to explain why.

To free up some temporarily you can reserve memory for the VMs if you have available. When you start a VM (let's say with 6GB RAM) and 0 reserve, vmware will create a 6GB virtual swap file. SO, if you have 10 VMs..this could get you in a pickle. If you clean up one VM at a time or reserve the memory before booting it will save you some storage until you get everything straightend out.

Last article we focus in how to VMware: How to create and use VMs TAGs – Part 1 so before follow this article and perform the next tasks, you should read the first article how to create the TAG before using them in Veeam Backup Jobs.